Make no mistake. It required a replay of Dalit rage to kickstart the process the justice on an incident as horrific as this. For weeks together, FIRs were not registered while the perpetrators roamed free and fearless in Khairlanje. The police connived with the perpetrators to behave as if nothing of consequence had happened with the Special IG (Nagpur) Pankaj Gupta allegedly accepting a bribe to say "there was no rape", doctors who conducted the post-mortem did not check for sexual assault or rape, local MLA Madhukar Kukade (BJP) was present at the post-mortems, it took two months for the chief minister and home minister to visit the scene of crime, the Director General of Police did not visit it. These, please note, are not allegations but findings of a high-level probe conducted by the state government agency YASHADA (Yashwantrao Chavan Academy of Development Administration). Damning indictments in themselves, they prompted an otherwise self-assured government to summarily sack five policemen.

By this time, Dalit rage had singed several towns and cities across Maharashtra, and had taken the nation by surprise. The immediate provocation for the spate of violence end November, almost two months after the horrific rape-murder was, ostensibly, the desecration of Dr Babasaheb Ambedkar's statue in Kanpur but within hours of the stone-pelting in Pune and Nashik, it was clear that this was no mere mob violence. It was the out-pouring of rage against a totally ineffective and stunningly insensitive state government over an atrocity that spelt doom for Dalits. It was their response to the strongest message ever that they did not matter, whatsoever. That their trials and tribulations were part of their lot and the state could, or would, do nothing about atrocities that regularly visit them. "Khairlanje incident is the end of imagination for us," remarked a passionate Nagsen Sonare, national president of Mumbai-based Ambedkar Center For Justice and Peace, on his website. In more ways than one, for Dalits in so-called progressive Maharashtra where Dalit advancement was spearheaded by social reformer no less than Jyotiba Phule in the 19^th century, Khairlanje marked a new low in caste atrocities. The Prevention of Atrocities Act had turned into a joke, yet again.

For weeks since news of the incident spread word-of-mouth, political as well as non-political Dalit activists, scattered and disparate Dalit groups in small towns and cities, discussed little else. They waited for two independent democratic institutions—the executive and the press—to join the battle on their behalf. The executive was, in fact, involved in an elaborate cover-up while the press—even the Marathi press—ignored it as yet another Dalit story from some indescribable village. In the end, they themselves joined the battle—not in some pre-meditated manner led by leaders but outbursts by mobs, some with political leaders at the helm but most without any leadership. No wonder then that the state government did not quite know who to talk to when the prestigious Deccan Queen—symbol of Mumbai-Pune caste and class superiority—was torched. Lack of leadership did not matter; rage had overtaken minor hurdles such as this. That the violence proved a god-send for many Dalit political leaders consigned to the margins is coincidental; it might even resurrect their dying careers for a brief while but they cannot claim to have aroused and inspired the mobs.

Violence that left crores of rupees worth government property damaged, mainly buses, railway compartments and offices, cannot be condoned irrespective of the cause behind it. When Prakash Ambedkar, grandson of Dr Babasaheb Ambedkar and leader of one of the six factions of the Republican Party of India, remarked that Dalits are militants and will always remain so, it was hardly music to anybody's ears. But to condemn the out-pouring of their rage is not all that easy. Call it a warped sense of vigilante justice, or an extreme temper tantrum to seek attention, or whatever else, the fact is that if it weren't for that rage on full national display, Khairlanje would have remained that forgotten village on the map even for those men who had taken oath to protect its inhabitants. Is it easy to condemn rage that eventually woke up a slumbering government and large, insensitive sections of the media?

If Priyanka Bhotmange were Priyadrshini Mattoo or Jessica Lal, the media would have thought it fit to intervene, run campaigns for justice. For Priyanka, whose dream it was to get a government job, there would never be candle-light protests at India Gate. Or even Gateway of India. Citizen activism takes on the textures and shades of citizens, after all. Upper middle class India lit candles, whether at India Gate or on news websites; young Dalit India torched trains. Protests do not come in pre-determined packs that can be picked off shelves in glittering malls across urban India. The Dalit rage is yet another reminder that there's an India that remains on the pavements outside these very malls, an India that stands excluded. As Gaddar, the well-known Naxal poet, once said: "My anger is rough, my words are rough because my life is coarse and so is my language". Condemn the violence by all means but not before you ask what escalated it to such a scale. Once the fire was lit, many joined in for their own grab—Dalit politicians, Naxal fringe groups, sections of the underworld that have a strong Dalit presence, opportunistic political parties that smell blood on the eve of municipal elections.

The rage was waiting to explode. Yet, in the thousands of atrocities that happen every year, what made this horrific incident any more horrific or gut-wrenching than the others? After all, this is the land where Dalits are made to eat human excreta. Khairlanje should have been no different, but it was. The rape-murders here were, indeed, the end of imagination of Dalits. This was not just another rape or murder of a family. The Bhotmanges, condemned to live the life determined by the Varna system, attempted to rise above it—and nearly did it. The 40-something Surekha tilled her land till it yielded something, anything. She put her children through school and college. Her daughter was reading Political Science and Sociology—no mean feat for a Dalit girl in a back-of-the-beyond village. OBC men had, on several occasions, tried to usurp the land and drive the family out of the village but Surekha—more than her husband Bhaiyyalal—had stood up to the men and their machinations. The family had received death threats in the last few months, Surekha's attempts to enlist police on her side did not yield any results. That was not a surprise but she had persisted in doing her duty in approaching the police.

Like scores of Dalits in Maharashtra who heeded and still heed Dr Ambedkar's call, the Bhotmanges believed the education alone would put them on the path of liberation. It's no social accident or social engineering that the Dalit literacy rate in the state at 72 per cent is twice the Indian average for the community. But an educated Dalit is perceived as a threat by caste Hindus, even the OBCs. Surekha's valiant efforts to ward of the land sharks—again OBC men of the village—and her battle to educate her children made her a symbol of resistance beyond imagination for them. Bhaiyylal is believed to have told sympathisers that he had even contemplated giving up the land and going away from Khairlanje but his wife never encouraged such thoughts. Eventually, he had to cower in fear behind a building and helplessly watch as she and his daughter were paraded naked, raped and murdered by a mob that then hunted down his two sons as well.

Yes, it was a mob too; they too perpetrated violence of the most horrific kind. Was there as strong a condemnation of that violence as we saw of the Dalit rage? In the rape-murder of the Bhotmange family, Dalits, mainly the youth, saw the death of a dream given by Babasaheb Ambedkar. Education and hard work did not bring liberation; these virtues only brought harassment, public humiliation, rape and death. The Bhotmanges, indeed Khairlanje, remains an unforgettable symbol of the defeat. Dalits see a bleak, unchanging, non-inclusive future, their political strength and voice lies tattered in several factions, their poetry and literature has lost its sting, even their imagination seems to end. Now, if only some of us upper middle class urbanites would tutor them the art of gentle protests, teach them to light candles.